The Era of Irresponsibility Is Coming to An End?

For many many years the dominant ideology in bitcoin community was that open source software such as bitcoin is “secure”, and that you need to trust the infinite wisdom of the crowd who will find all the bugs and fix them, the wisdom of the anonymous founder of bitcoin who predicted all the attacks in advance, the wisdom of bitcoin developers, etc.

In private sector people spend billions on security and they frequently fail to secure their systems. Now in bitcoin, a bunch of people who are not paid for their efforts will make it secure?

Things are changing. There are very strong signals that shoddy security, minimizing the risks, poor security expertise, bad software, bad security engineering practices, and avoiding to talk about serious security problems (or exaggerating less essential problems) will no longer be tolerated. An open reflection about how to secure bitcoin engaging serious security professionals has started. There is a new C4 consortium which includes people like Peter Todd who have in the past criticized a lot the careless attitude of others in bitcoin community. They are developing standards or professional and ethical behaviour(!). It looks like a genuine effort to improve the security culture in bitcoin.